[cwizou]

They did, but late 2023 is still a very short timeframe (less than 3 years) to get a custom arm64 CPU architecture, ready to ship.

Pre armv8, Qualcomm had strong custom cores, but Krait (their armv8 custom implementation) didn't exactly perform well compared to basic Cortexes from ARM (a problem that wasn't unique to Qualcomm, to be fair), and Qualcomm moved to using those generic ARM cores on most of their lineup.

Qualcomm reportedly did get some TMSC volume at 5/6nm that would correspond to that timeframe, but the timing would be extremely optimistic considering how long of a lead time you need, even if the Nuvia acquisition solved all their problems.

[NoahKAndrews]

Slight correction: Krait was the name for the excellent ARMv7 core design. The underwhelming ARMv8 replacement was named Kryo. Confusingly, they (at least for a while) kept the Kryo branding even after they switched to lightly-customized versions of cores designed by ARM.

[cwizou]

You're right, I misremembered here.

The renaming part btw was quite awful of them, they had a hard time acknowledging that they went back to Cortex based cores and I remember their press release trying to imply they didn't.

They were quite hammering the fact they had a custom arch pre v8, and the turnaround was difficult for them to admit.

[LinAGKar]

Not just for a while, they're still calling them Kryo, even after moving to ARMv9